A report compiled by Statistics Canada, an organisation within the Canadian government, says this:
Of the 15,300 people who died of COVID-19 between March and December 2020, nearly 9 in 10 had at least one other health condition or complication or another cause listed on the death certificate.
Briefing on the Impact of COVID-19 on Seniors
This is nothing new, we’ve already heard this many times since back in April 2020 at least: people dying from this virus were overwhelmingly already ill and diseased. Many places have in fact explicitly said that deaths are counted as caused by this virus not because it was what killed them, but because they recently tested positive (a “case”, in post 2020 lingo). See footnote 7 on this Ontario government site:
Any case marked “Fatal” is included in the deaths data. Deaths are included whether or not COVID-19 was determined to be a contributing or underlying cause of death
How Ontario is responding to COVID-19
The report also says deaths from the virus are mostly old people, which again has been known since the beginning.
Between March 2020 and the beginning of February 2021, seniors accounted for 7 in 10 excess deaths, and 94% of the deaths were attributed to COVID-19. The majority of Canadians who died from COVID-19 were residents of long-term care homes.
More than half were people 85 and older (greater than life expectancy at birth). The chart that shows this includes both excess deaths and virus deaths.
Excess deaths are much more skewed towards the young, and a second Statistics Canada report spells this out explicitly:
Based on the newly updated provisional dataset released today from the Canadian Vital Statistics Death Database, from the end of March 2020 to the beginning of April 2021, an estimated 62,203 deaths were reported among Canadians aged 0 to 64. This represents 5,535 more deaths than expected were there no pandemic, after accounting for changes in the population such as aging. Over the same period, 1,380 COVID-19 deaths have been attributed to the same age group (those younger than 65), suggesting that the excess mortality is, in large part, related to other factors such as increases in the number deaths attributed to causes associated with substance use and misuse, including unintentional (accidental) poisonings and diseases and conditions related to alcohol consumption.
Provisional death counts and excess mortality, January 2020 to April 2021
This is the Canadian government officially saying that for people under 65, the effects of lockdowns are four times more deadly than the virus.
It shouldn’t have to be said, but in order to justify the extreme, unprecedented measures that we’re enduring, that we’re seeing every day interfering with nearly every aspect of our lives, the scale of the threat that they will with a high certainty avoid would have to be great in proportion to the extremity and degree of disruption they cause. That is, the restrictions would need to be confidently know to save a large multiple of people that would be lost without them.
What we’re seeing–as reported by an official government body whose purpose is exactly statistical analysis of Canadian demographics–is that not only is this not the case, but the reverse is true: the restrictions are resulting in more deaths, not less.